The Therapy Industrial Complex

If you are of a certain age you recall the days when anti-war activists were declaiming that young people were cannon fodder for the military industrial complex. That meant, their lives were expendable in the pursuit of less than noble military objectives.

Nowadays, we learn from reading a website called Evie, young leftist women are fodder for the therapy industrial complex. It was reporting on a study performed by the Pew Research Center. It identifies the women in question as liberal, but it seems really to point to women who are true believing ideologues, who have bought the theoretical swill that the radical left has been selling. In my view, they are probably not liberal. Or, at least, allow me to hope.

The research shows that women who hold to what are called progressive ideologies-- they are no more progressive than they are liberal-- suffer more mental illness than do other human beings. They are fodder for the therapy industrial complex. Just when you thought that there was no saving grace to this leftist ideology, console yourself with the thought that it is keeping therapists in business.

Evie explains:

But what if what was once a cheap shot or a personal insult has actually been found to bear scientific correlation between the individuals who hold progressive ideologies and an increased risk of mental illness? That’s exactly what Pew Research has found — and all politics aside, the shocking diagnosis of over 50% of liberal women with some form of mental health medical diagnosis is a public health concern that no one seems to be discussing, let alone taking seriously. 

And also, those most afflicted are white:

The study, which examined white liberals, moderates, and conservatives, both male and female, found that conservatives were far less likely to be diagnosed with mental health issues than those who identified as either liberal or even “very liberal.” What’s more, white women suffered the worst of all. White women, ages 18-29, who identified as liberal were given a mental health diagnosis from medical professionals at a rate of 56.3%, as compared to 28.4% in moderates and 27.3% in conservatives.

Normally, you would think that these women, feminists all, are on good terms with their bodies and their emotions. Then again, if American society is so completely sexist, feeling good about oneself would betray the cause.

Apparently, such is not the case:

Conditions like depression and anxiety thrive in silence, but there also seems to be a lack of confidence in women when it comes to knowing our own bodies, and instead our mental problems are written off as being too overly “emotional.” (Think about how many times someone has described you or another woman as emotional.) While hormones do obviously play a role in the development of mental health, for better or for worse, it’s possible to minimize or downplay the risks our mental health is facing if they’re written off as a “hormonal” issue, whether it’s our medical professionals or even ourselves engaging in that mindset. 

Then again, seeing yourself as a victim, seeing yourself as constantly abused by sexism, peering around corners and looking into everyone’s mind for evidence of abuse and harassment, does not improve your mental health. It certainly does not improve your relationship to your body when you are persuaded that your femininity is a vulnerability that men will naturally assault and abuse.

Dr. Lyle Rossiter, a board-certified psychiatrist who’s treated mental disorders for over 30 years, agrees and adds that white liberalism thrives on supposedly championing “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed,” who they continuously see as “wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited, and victimized” with little to no agency of their own (A view that often mutates into the infantilizing and patronizing of certain groups within a narrative). 

The people responsible for these crimes? As Rossiter tells it: “poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization, and imperialism. In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: ‘Big Business,’ ‘Big Corporations,’ ‘greedy capitalists,’ ‘U.S. Imperialists,’ ‘the oppressors,’ ‘the rich,’ ‘the wealthy,’ ‘the powerful,’ and ‘the selfish’.”

It’s the narrative, stupid. Leftist women buy into the oppression narrative and divide the world into oppressors and the oppressed. They set out to right wrongs, to produce justice, by fighting against anyone they consider to be on the other side of the great divide. This makes them define their lives in terms of conflict and drama. Few things are more conducive to bad mental health than making your life into conflict and drama.

It’s all about grievances:

That’s pretty much an exhaustive list of every grievance and every perpetrator that progressives see as responsible for these injustices which plague our disenfranchised communities while moderates and conservatives seemingly sit idly by unconcerned with anything but their own privilege.

But as the study exemplifies, the champions of these causes (white women in particular) aren’t exactly living the liberated utopia they believe we all should be living. 

Let’s emphasize the last point. Leftist ideologues do not live in the real world. They do not believe in negotiating with real people or with real social structures. They have come to inhabit an alternative universe, a fiction concocted by the practice of storytelling-- see yesterday’s post on couples therapy.

Unfortunately, this fictional world, the way things would be if feminist ideology defined reality, does not exist. Not only that, but the more you buy the ideology the less skilled you will be at dealing with human beings, especially human beings of the male species. This produces great frustration and causes some women to try to impose the terms of their narrative on their real life relations. The narratives create expectations that can only be disappointed. At times this ruins the taste. More often, it causes real life relationships to implode-- and this produces misery.